Monthly Archives: August 2014

. Chemicals

Maybe the chemicals needed for these types of things no longer flow accurately… My mind makes a mockery of all natural and fairly simple things. Things that should ideally coexist beautifully – like love and lust.

Yet, these two have become entirely different to me now. They are two ends of the same snake eating its own tail. They will lead back into each other continually but only come together in some sort of violence. They refuse to operate along the same guidelines.

My lust causes romance to become obtrusive and deserving of ridicule. Nothing beautiful belongs in these moments. 
Only hues of black and blue and green underneath.
I do not make love, I make you do everything else. I make you suffer. You burst into flames, then I throw your ashes out over the ocean. 
And my palms pressed into your neck make you feel like you’re drowning.

Then we wake up in a hotel overlooking the east coast. Like we got lucky and somehow drifted back to shore. Your limbs are twisted into mine, and my arms and torso are wrapped delicately in your black hair – like seaweed decorates a shipwreck.
You listen to my heart push blood around inside my body. Back and forth. Waxing and waning like the tide. But now the current is so very low – so very far away from you – because I’m back in love and you are safe. Away from filth and depravity of moments ago. Like it was all swept away in the undertow.  Though, we both know that tonight, my heart will push the tide back in, and soon it will engulf you entirely, and you will once again begin to drown. Gasping for air. Clawing at my chest. Your empty vessel will again be lost in the fury of my seas. My waves crashing relentlessly against you. Doomed to break apart and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

…..then we wake up again, strewn about like broken planks torn from haunted shipwrecks. Waterlogged. Safely washed ashore together.

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. Fireflies

Pulses of anxiety run up my legs and rush up my spine towards my brain the way squirrels climb up bird feeders out back. They collect tiny peices of my mind and run away out into the yard. Every morning I am confronted with the awareness that there are despicable things waiting, and every morning I wake up with less and less of the pieces required to place logic and reasoning in between me and the fear. The Earth feels entirely hollow beneath my feet and inclined to crack and give way at any moment. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years stuck in that tiny bit of helplessness you feel when you go to pay at a restaurant and suddenly discover your wallet missing. 
Vertigo is my consort.
What a repugnant companion.
What an uncharming life.

I lay in my bed and listen to the overwhelming silence and try frantically to discover any type of distraction. I begin to focus on the sound of my cat patting around a small insect – Indifferent to its demise.  It reminds me of being a child in Jersey and all the times I used to bring jars of fireflies in from the field. My mother would smile. Even fully aware that I was destroying all these undeserving little things, she didnt say a word. Innocence is so endearing even though it can mean the destruction of another. A child kills something and we feel empathy, an adult kills something and we feel rage and sickness. It becomes forgivable when we know not our trail of ruined things or countless inflictions. That’s the basis of a lot of poisonous relationships in our lives. Its also the basis of a blissful, childlike existence.

My mother crept into my room each morning and threw away my jar of dead things and smiled. As if I was a cat who dragged a lifeless mouse in as a deplorable gift. To give thanks. She understood that its better to pick the mangled rodent up with a glove and a trash bin than to tamper with that type of innocence and instill the kind of messes within a child that no disinfectant can clean. Thats what we do when we are young – our selfishness and innocence is the most admirable and preposessing thing, even through the complete destruction of all else. 

My only goal in life is to never stop being capable of this. Everything else can drop dead behind me and I’ll hardly notice. I’d like to playfully rip the world apart limb from limb between my claws like an insect and then move on to another without any recollection.

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.X

6:35am

I am surrounded by black ash. This is hindsight. Its clear as day now, but I don’t remember any flames from last night. In fact, if it wasn’t for spending my morning wafting through these fading embers, I wouldn’t have any inclination to remember anything at all. I must have said too much last night. I must have drank too much. I must have taken it too far again. But.. Too far? Is there even such a thing anymore?  Wherever “too far” is, I’d like to go there.
In fact I suppose I will spend the rest of my life looking for it.

But is “too far” a person, place, or thing? I’m intrigued by the possibilities.

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.X

Sometimes you meet the most distasteful people who have an amazing, almost admirable disregard for themselves and others. And you sit across from them in a Tampa parking garage and listen to them lie directly to your face and its evident that you know it, but they dont break. You stare them directly in the eyes. As deep as the eyes allow. Which is surprisingly pretty far. 1000 miles, and yet still no signs of a bottom. Just a dark empty hallway with an endless amout of exits that lead you right back to the beginning.  And you begin to wonder…..Is there even a life in there?

Where did you come from and how could you possibly have made it this far?

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. Ribbons

After the rain, the streets are impossibly smooth here as if they were composed of silk and not crumbled brick. They twist haphazardly throughout this city like ribbons strewn about, like they were dropped from the sky and left here by some lazy god.  In my own town I feel alone, but out here these ribbons drape around my body like lovers limbs.

I’ll never sleep alone out here, but in my own home, not a single tongue has ever took the shape of my name. Not a single arm has ever formed the curve of my shoulders. If I had touched you the way I touch these old brick roads, I would have never had to visit this place.

But its probably far too late. I dont know. My mind doesnt think clearly these days. I have an empty bottle and a birthday card with my name spelled wrong.
I have expletives and hard words in my memory and a couple of songs that make me feel as if the future is bright, man.

I have everything I could possibly need and I dont want a single bit of it. I come out here because not a god damn thing in this city belongs to me and nothings more romantic than that. Everyone here moves without my legs and they build without my arms. They all kiss without my lips and the ladies wear the most beautiful sundresses. They capture my heart and keep moving. The sort of girls who get a little too tipsy on the first date and kiss you in mid sentence and then walk away due to embarrassment which is the most annoying and sexy thing a woman can do.
Here in this place, the mouths all chatter and I walk closely enough to hear voices, but far enough to not make out the words like the humming of hymns outside of cathedrals.  It all sounds so gorgeous out of context,  but to take part would rob it of all its beauty due to the simple fact that the truth that lies behind any noun is hardly as fantastic as the surface.  Like bright green, landscaped graveyards with marble and ivory placed perfectly makes us forget the rot placed below.

Logic always crumbles under the weight of obsession. This place bore through me and took place of all rational thought. It’s ribbons began to fray and tie themselves in knots around my extremities.  So how could I expect any type of reprieve from coming home when I can no longer even hear their whimpers for my return? No, I couldn’t be gone long enough.

The rest of the world is consistently in frantics. Trampling each other due to some sort of instinctual pull that has always eluded me. Pushing themselves further upstream and straight into the jaws of awaiting bears. The humor of one species deep rooted instinct driving it to become nothing more than plaque on the teeth of another. So, I stopped swiming and I keep floating away out to sea, here in the middle of nowhere, to this strange town. At first, I am enveloped in the deepest black, but every morning at dawn, when the rest of the world sits chewed in the stomachs behind the mouths of bears, the sun from above the surface turns my town into the most astonishing blue hue just like the sea and, similarly, I float slowly to the bottom of it with ribbons tied around my neck and wrists and legs.

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.Dreams

I dont fall in love with people. Not in the present tense, at least. I fall in love with absence – and the wonder and infinite possibilities that come with it.

Theres hardly much passion left to the flesh. I lust after it, but I suppose that could be anyone. Thats too easy and its all been done a million times over.

You see, the outside world is terribly boring and it has its limits, but in my mind….

….. she goes on and on forever.

When we meet, hardly anything goes right but at night alone, the Earth rattles when I close my eyes. So I’ve been awake for days.

Months.

Years.

I don’t even remember.

I don’t even care.

I fall in love with memories of women long gone. Memories that I’ve conveniently twisted to suit my needs.

Ideas, dreams, fantasies….these are my tempestuous lovers.

But they are all mine.

Perhaps because these things can be controlled and changed when I need them to change. They leave when I need them to be gone and when I’m desperate, they crawl out of the trees and tie ropes around my neck for me.

In my dreams, she can stay safe. She climbs into my chest and closes my torso like a child hiding in a cabinet from a monster. She waits til the footsteps slowly fade away, and when its safe again, she climbs out of my body and lays next to it but she never lets go. She holds me like a snail holds its shell.

But only in dreams – because there is no salvation to me in real life. I am not her shell, I am her anchor.

And I make her sick

She screams at the top of her lungs but I just don’t go away.

It’s 1:30pm

Im sitting on the floor spinning an old hair tie that she left here months ago between my fingers.

And I’m smiling.

I’m smiling because shes gone, so I can finally fall in love with her again.

In dreams.

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